A blog about Politics, Economics, and assorted random things I find interesting

02/02/2018

Do not be misled: I absolutely believe the Federal government must secure the borders and reform our embarrassing immigration system.

But a border wall is a terrible idea for a few reasons:

It will cost a lot of money up front and take a long time to build

It will cost a fortune in yearly upkeep

It is insufficient to guarantee border security

For the $25 billion or so they are estimating it might cost, we could buy a LOT of border patrol officers and equipment. That will buy a lot of surveillance drones, or a network of thermal sensors. Just going by upfront cost, the border wall is a poor investment in terms of cost and capability.

Finally, infrastructure is not a one-time expense. The more infrastructure you have, the more you must maintain. This problem is magnified when you have someone actively seeking to destroy the infrastructure (as inevitably, someone will attempt to dig under and bore through the wall in many locations).

The only real value of the wall is symbolic. And is a wall like the Berlin Wall a symbol we want to have associated with the USA? The passive defense a wall provides is a poor investment and provides less capability than more active security measures like drone patrols or sensor networks, satellite surveillance, or what have you.

And while border security is important, we could make it much easier to secure the border if we:

1) made illegals absolutely ineligible for government assistance or licensing

2) insisted on education only in English for primary schools.

3) required national verification of lawful status for any and all employees

4) Made it MUCH MUCH easier for people desiring to become Americans to immigrate legally.

Some of the most patriotic Americans you will ever find are those who had to WORK and WAIT for their citizenship. They realize how precious America is and value that citizenship very highly. We want more people like that living here.

Our current system provides the exact opposite of correct inventive: it makes it easy and inconsequential to immigrate illegally, and it makes it unreasonably difficult to follow the law and do it "right." Any attempt to fix our immigration system that looks at only one half of the issue is a misguided attempt that will surely fail.

12/11/2017

The Supreme court heard recently the oral arguments in the case of the Colorado cake baker who declined to bake a cake for a gay wedding. Reading the briefs and the summaries of oral arguments, it occurred to me that the Court is facing a very difficult decision here. But that difficulty is entirely the Court's creation because of its own precedent.

The Court has declined for a long time to invalidate certain precedents when they become unworkable, choosing instead to try and craft little rules of thumb and obscure sub-interpretations that history has shown to create the proverbial Pandora's box.

Did any of the Justices ruling in Griswold intend to create a right to abortion? I don't think so. But by discovering in the "penumbras and emanations" a right to privacy, and by construing that right a certain way, we gained essentially a constitutional right to murder, albeit under limited conditions.

Likewise, the Hobby Lobby case had the Court craft the novel idea of a "closely held" business being entitled to a right of religious conviction that exempted them from Obamacare requirements. What is "closely held"? How big can a business be before it loses the right to determine its employment policies? Naturally, the Court punted on these points. Left completely uncertain is what businesses have which rights when it comes to Obamacare mandates-- or any other federal legislation that conflicts with employer's preferred policies. What if Hobby Lobby wasn't privately held? How do you measure the sincerity of the religious beliefs of the owners? How senior must someone be to speak for the company?

Examples of such unresolved and perhaps unresolvable questions abound, drawn from many cases that all point to the same conclusion: the Court is weaving a web of impossibility for itself and for all of us as Americans.

Where the Court erred is in its construct of "public access." Civil Rights legislation introduced the idea that a business open to the general public is offering a public accommodation. This is a fallacy, though. While a business may be open to the public, the conduct of business is on the private level. In other words, private business transactions are conducted with parties drawn from the general public. But these are not "public" transactions, they are private. As such, businesses do not accommodate the public at large, they accommodate individuals drawn from the public at large. This is a subtle but profound distinction.

As such, the correct governing principle is mutual consent. Are both parties agreeable to the transaction? Any legislation that grants a "civil right" to a transaction can only give that right after first having taken away the right of free association from another party. In the case of the Colorado baker, the "right" to have a cake baked for your wedding can only come from having taken away the baker's right to consent--or not consent-- to a transaction.

Having made the baker's consent secondary to whether a belief is "sincere" or whether a cake is "speech" is all nonsense. Sincerity cannot be measured as a matter of law, and it's untenable to place that in the law.

Moreover, the Baker's right at stake is not a right of "expression" either-- whether that is religious expression or "speech." Rather, it is the right of free association, which is even more fundamental than any form of expression. Everyone accepts that there must be limits on what you may say (i.e. "fighting words" or "fire in a crowded theater") and that there may even be limits on religious exercise (i.e., you cannot sacrifice children even if you sincerely believe it is pleased in your religion).

But who accepts the idea that you may not freely choose your friends? That you may not freely choose which civic groups you will belong to or avoid? That you may not exercise sole discretion over which job offer you will accept? Or which college you will attend?

The right of free association is perhaps the most fundamental of all rights. And it has been severely undermined in the name of "rights" that the Court has created from whole cloth.

I'm not expecting the Court to have the courage to undo the absurd doctrine of public access laws. But it will be interesting to see how it attempts to square the circle.

07/13/2017

Few things bother me more than the absurd torturing of logic and reason required to label something "sustainable." I apologize to those educated readers who are aware of the 2nd law of Thermodynamics and already know why nothing is sustainable. But there's more to it than just an abstraction of perpetually increasing entropy. There are practical questions that the environmental movement chooses to ignore and cannot answer reasonably.

What exactly does sustainability mean? If solar output declines due to cloud cover (as often happens), then what percentage of that plant's output is sustainable? If a plant can produce 10MW in bright sun but only 800kW in thick clouds, is only 800kW sustainable? Clearly, 10MW is not sustainable through a passing cloud or at night.

If an engineer defined "sustainability" is would be something like: "an energy source is sustainable if it can be expected to last more than 20 years and will over its lifetime produce greater than 100% of the energy it takes to produce, dispose and/or recycle." Of course the 20 year mark is arbitrary. But that's the point: every definition of "sustainable" is arbitrary.

Why are fossil fuels not sustainable? Humans have been harvesting coal for hundreds of years, oil and natural gas in meaningful amounts for well over a century. All the empirical evidence suggests that the fossil fuels can be sustained indefinitely. If a over a century of sustained use of an energy source doesn't demonstrate sustainability, then what is the standard of proof? Two hundred years of use?

Why are energy sources that receive massive amounts of government subsidy considered sustainable, but not those that receiver proportionally much less or none at all? Doesn't the presence necessity of subsidy inversely reflect the true sustainability of a source? If not, why not?

Is carbon emission the only applicable standard of sustainability? If not, what other measures are germane?

These are some of the questions that easily befuddle many environmentalists. But with enough thought, the smarter ones can be brought around to a realization: sustainability is not a scientific term. It is a political and economic term. It is political because of the power and money the issue attracts.

But more than anything else, it is an economic term. Something can be sustained as long as there is an economic incentive to do so. Whale oil as a lamp fuel would have been sustainable indefinitely. It's just that eventually enough whales were killed that it made the oil very costly to procure and made substitutes like kerosene far more appealing. The level of price at which whale oil would be sustained would be far too expensive for it to be useful. So it was not sustained-- but it could have been.

Likewise, Buffalo were hunted nearly to extinction in North America. But not totally. Why not? It simple: at some point, the scarcity made the value of buffalo much higher than the utility of killing more of them.

Absurd faith in carbon-scare computer models aside, there's no reason to think that fossil fuels will become any time soon more costly to use than they are worth. To the contrary, the world is "doubling down" with more fossil fuels being than ever before. Even as the world consumes more electricity than ever, electricity is overwhelmingly produced from fossil fuel sources.

There isn't any real debate. The issue is "settled" because people have voted globally with their feet. Fossil fuels are now and will remain for the foreseeable future the dominant and preferred energy source, and over time, this dominance has grown, not waned. They are getting cheaper, not more expensive. We are producing more, not less.

Let's stop pretending and just move on with optimizing the efficiency with which we consume those wonderful fossil fuels that are greening the planet and lifting millions out of poverty.

Poor data analysis techniques are alarmingly common in "hard" sciences like chemistry and physics. But it is truly an epidemic in social sciences where most of the "research" is done by advocacy groups setting out to prove a pre-existing conclusion. Recall that phrase about using science "as a drunk uses a lamppost: for support rather than enlightenment." (An example of how junk research is done is found in this post about guns and crime, where simply shifting the observed time period a couple years produced the opposite "proof" of the study).

So we know there is a lot of junk science out there. We know the EPI is an advocacy group, publishing studies in social science-- the discipline far most likely to contain some junk science. How rigorous is this study?

The Study

The executive summary of the study lists lots of claims that all generally go to support the claim that unions raise wages for both the unionized and non-unionized worker alike. The core findings of the study, however, concern the impact of unionization rates upon non-union wages.

On its face, this is a plausible claim. Indeed, higher wages and benefits are the raison d'être of organized labor. It is important to understand the mechanism by which this works: by introducing artificial scarcity, the existing demand will drive union wages higher by the reduction of supply. The union gets to be the monopoly provider of labor to the business that is unionized. It's pretty clear how union membership increases the wages of those union members.

It is also plausible that higher union wages might simultaneously raise non-union wages because the opportunity cost of union labor is higher, so the benefit of non-union labor is also higher. Putting numbers to it, if the free market labor rate is $20/hr and the union rate is $30/hr, a non-union worker could offer to work for $25 and still be cheaper than the union, while earning a premium relative to the free market rate. Remember that last phrase, as that is critical.

You can see that's it's reasonable to construct a situation where unionization raises the wages of both organized and non-union labor. But being able construct a scenario where this happens is not the same as saying that it actually has happened on a broad scale across a national labor market. And it is still another thing to claim that if it did happen on a broad scale at one period in time, that all of those factors would again combine the the same way to produce the same effects in a time period nearly 40 years removed.

While the authors do present some data for their claims, they also make some bald assertions that are completely unsubstantiated:

In the ongoing debates over wage stagnation, these indirect effects of unions have not received nearly the attention as the oft-cited accounts mentioned above. Partly this is due to the difficulty in disentangling the independent effect of unions on nonunion workers’ pay. Globalization, technological advances, and institutional shifts—most notably the dramatic decline of the U.S. labor movement, along with the falling real value of the minimum wage—have all affected average workers’ wages. These developments are intertwined in numerous ways. For example, union decline reduced resistance to offshoring, and offshoring, or the threat thereof, emboldened employers in union negotiations

There is no evidence to support the idea that the unions were able to keep companies from offshoring. And it's far from given that a union can both create the benefit of offshoring (via "union wage premium" and also dis-incentivize that same off-shoring. How is it that a union can prevent off-shoring? It cannot. Clearly other factors may explain the marginal utility of offshoring: increased productivity in the developing world, enhanced capital mobility, improvements in the rule of law and safety of intellectual property, etc. It seems for more plausible to me that union strength, not decline, drove much of the appeal to offshoring. The value of off-shoring derives substantially from the opportunity cost of on-shore labor.

Methodology

To really find out why the study is bogus, we have to dive into the methodology. Hang in there, this gets a little nerdy. The first thing to observe is what they include in their sample:

All of our analyses are limited to nonunion private-sector workers who report positive wages and report working 30 or more hours per week and are between the ages of 16 and 64. We exclude top-level managers along with the self-employed.

Samples are often a primary contributor to invalid results. In this case, the sample seems plausible. It is very large and encompasses a substantial portion of the nonunion labor force.

For our model-predicted wage series, referred to in the text as our “estimated” weekly wages, we regress weekly wages for private-sector workers who are not union members on the following set of covariates: industry-region unionization (described above), a oneyear lagged version of the industry-region employment rate (described above), four mutually exclusive race/ethnicity measures (non-Hispanic white, non-Hispanic AfricanAmerican, non-Hispanic other, and Hispanic), four mutually exclusive education measures (less than high school, high school diploma or equivalent, some college, four or more years of college), potential experience and potential experience squared, a set of four occupational measures (professional/managerial, production, service, farm/forestry/ fisheries), hours worked per week, a measure of whether the respondent lives in a metropolitan area, year dummies, and a dummy indicating whether the respondent works in the manufacturing sector. Wages are measured in constant 2013 dollars, and models are weighted to be representative of the active workforce. For our analyses of non–college degree and high school or less workers, we replicate the model described above but limit the sample first to those workers with less than a bachelor’s, and then to those workers with a high school diploma or less. We cluster our standard errors by industry-region in all models.

Our counterfactual series replicates the model described above except we set the industry-region unionization rates at their 1979 levels. That is, we solve the regression equation by plugging in the observed values for every other covariate except for industryregion unionization. For example, for each individual in the dataset, we treat that individual as if their industry-union rate was equal to the 1979 rate (regardless of what the true rate is in that particular year), leave all other covariate values equal to their observed values, and compute their predicted weekly wage using the estimated model equation. Instead of modeling log weekly wages, we estimate generalized linear models (GLM) specifying a log link and gamma distribution family. 50 While estimating a log-linear model and then applying an appropriate smearing factor to retransform the dependent variable will improve the mean predicted wages relative to exponentiating log wages, this approach does not ensure that predictions for individual cases are particularly accurate, and there is little consensus regarding what smearing factor is preferable. Our approach does not require transformation of the dependent variable in the first place or retransformation post-estimation in order to predict values of the dependent variable in its raw-scale. We experimented with other common approaches, such as retransforming our predictions to the original scale following the estimation of log-linear ordinary least square (OLS) models using naive and Duan smearing estimators. Results are available upon request. In general, the GLM approach produces slightly larger counterfactual wage estimates than retransforming and using the Duan smearing estimators.

OK, what is that in English?

A regression is simply a comparison in how changes in one factor relate to changes in another. A good model with statistical power can predict the change in the dependent variable based on changes in the independent variable(s). It's like collecting a bunch of data relating how hard you throw a ball to how far it goes. With good analysis, you can predict (with high precision) the distance the ball will travel if you know how hard it was thrown. That is a simple two-factor regression. You can add several more factors and often get some fascinating results. For example, I once generated a multiple regression model that could predict within 7 degrees Fahrenheit the temperature of a section of a diesel engine piston based on fuel rate, injection timing, and a couple other factors.

But this study "regresses" the dependent variable against all those factors listed above relating to race, region, education, ethnicity, hours worked, etc. The thing with regression is that it must be done with continuous variables as independent variables. That means each factor must be capable of assuming the infinite range of values within its limits. It is "continuous" because there are no gaps in the range of values the variable can take. This is critical because regression is dealing with rates of change between variables. The difference between 3 and 4 is one. But what is the numerical difference between White and Hispanic? Regression must be able to quantify a change in an independent variable. It cannot do that for "occupational measures."

Which means that each of these variable must be made into "dummy" variables that are completely and utterly arbitrary. So perhaps you assign a value of -2 to not having finished high school, -1 to high school diploma, 0 to Bachelor's degree, 1 to Master's, and 2 to PhD. The problem with that approach should be pretty obvious; if you are attempting to examine the impact on wages, then the gap between variable positions must be the same. For example, if you have a variable like temperature to the nearest degree, it would be OK because the difference between 30 and 31 means the same as the difference between 50 and 51: namely, a single degree Fahrenheit. THIS IS NOT THE CASE WITH EDUCATION, you cannot consider the five levels of education I just outlined from the view that the differences between each increment are comparable with respect to wages. Moving from "1" to "2" is not twice as much education.

The only proper way to use a dummy variable in regression is as a binary yes/no indicator-- and even then it introduces much source of error. For example, a researcher studying life expectancy in Kansas might make a dummy variable of "is there a war happening" with yes/no options (usually represented by one or zero, like in computer programming). But that is irrelevant because you can't really define "war" in a context like this, and it would be far less of an indicator than the number of Kansans present in the military at any given time.

Returning the education example, one could create a dummy variable for "master's degree" that is yes or no (1, 0). But those with Master's degrees had to get Bachelor's degrees, too-- which means that every "1" for Master's should also have a "1" for Bachelor's. Meaning you have massive collinearity in the variables if you do it this way.

Because of these dummy variables, the numerical precision of the regression is certainly wrong.

Moreover, the authors make the absurd assumptions that everything (except unionization rates) were the same in 1979. This is where taking techniques from the hard sciences and employing them in social science leads to junk.

Note also how we get certain factors to be lagged, squared, and such. There's no discussion of why lagging one year-- instead of three or not at all-- is the right amount. Nore is there any argument as to why certain factors should be squared.

In hard sciences, such lagging and squaring is very common, but it is completely justifiable. For example, science empirically proved long ago that aerodynamic drag is proportional to the cube of speed. So it would be appropriate to use "speed cubed" in a regression of factors that determine aerodynamic drag.

Not so with using "potential experience squared." What is "potential experience"? Why is it appropriate to square it?

To me, this suggests model "tuning" or "p-hacking" as the video above describes. The authors massaged their model until it supported (albeit very weakly) the headline case they wanted to argue: the unions help EVERYONE, even the non-union worker.

09/28/2016

By now, those paying attention at all know that Hillary Clinton illegally used private email for government business, illegally stored classified information on that system, and has lied repeatedly to obscure those two facts.

06/01/2016

The recent media hype about “equality” with respect to bathrooms and gender has spurred a larger conversation about equality and the limits of discrimination. I’ve always wondered why it is that the politicians and business leaders like to couch this equality issue in economic terms. Consider this excerpt from an interview with Doug Burgum, candidate for Governor of North Dakota, on the impact of state legislation that would forbid discrimination based on gender identity as well as sexual orientation:

Currently, North Dakota has over 23,000 job openings. From an economic impact, filling these jobs would be like adding another large city to our state. Every policy the legislature is considering should be viewed through a lens of supporting workforce development in the state. After decades of watching the majority of our North Dakota University System graduates leave the state, we are now in new territory. We are not producing enough graduates to fill all the open positions in the state. We need population growth by both retention and net in-migration to fulfill our enviable growth needs. The aged 18-35 year old demographic is particularly attuned to the social climate of our cities and state. Any laws we have that discriminate against or limit the rights of any citizens based on gender orientation create a barrier for recruiting and retaining talent in our state.

Let’s put aside the disingenuity of using the impossible ideal of zero percent unemployment (an undesirable and impossible condition).

Let’s focus on the core fallacy Burgum uses—one shared by all the advocates of his position. Namely, the fallacy is that unless a law bans transgender discrimination, then the silence of the law assures 100% discrimination. Of course, Burgum then argues that there are economic advantages to preventing such discrimination. Stated differently, there is an economic disadvantage to allowing discrimination.

But if that is truly the case, then why would the law be necessary? If it is truly the case that economic advantage flows from extending special protections to the transgendered, then no business would indulge that discrimination without incurring an economic loss.

And what of those businesses that chose to incur that price? If you favor non-discrimination, wouldn’t you prefer that those who discriminate pay some kind of price to do so? Wouldn’t you prefer to gain a competitive advantage over your bigoted economic rivals? OF COURSE you would.

The only logically consistent position for the advocates of transgender (indeed all such LGBT) protections then is that they actually expect to have a disadvantage in the marketplace. Because they expect that people will prefer not to patronize a business with transgendered employees, their indulgence of the “equality” scam is really an effort to remove the competitive advantage a business rival may have from their “discrimination” against transgendered employees.

Consider the case of Hooters. What if you wanted to start a restaurant that also had the mediocre food I’m told Hooters has, but you resented the competitive advantage Hooters had in selling its food using attractive females? Why, let’s end discrimination against less attractive, less female, employees! With Hooters’ business model disrupted, you can sell you own mediocre food on a level playing field. Or something closer to level.

The point of the Hooters example is that a business can gain competitive advantage (or reduce the advantage of a rival) using the power of the government’s “equality” legislation.

Which means that the business lobby and its powerful interest groups really care about minimizing competition, and they want the government to protect them. Which is just about always the case in every circumstance.

The granting of special protections to the transgendered is therefore just time-honored rent-seeking in a newer, more fashionable guise. That, and elites wanting to force to people to adhere to a code that they themselves may not consider binding.

02/04/2016

I’m intending to vote for Rubio, even though on paper Cruz is better aligned to my positions.

When I consider the Presidency, I consider not just a candidate’s views on issues, but how well they will represent the United States and how well they will represent me. I also think it is critically important that my candidate be able to advance my ideas and persuade others. I’d much rather have a candidate who is very persuasive and only 80% in agreement with me than one who is 100% aligned and causes people to tune out.

My assessment then is that Rubio’s shortcomings are more forgivable and less consequential than are those of Cruz. Of the two, who will better represent the United States internationally? Domestically? Critically, who is more likely to persuade people, and who is just preaching to a choir?

Cruz’s shortcomings I consider less errors of judgment and more errors of character. The ‘voter violation’ mailers in Iowa, while based on valid research and likely effective in boosting turnout, are in my view a slimy tactic. Cruz seems to think that “by whatever means necessary’ is OK. Embellishing a news account about Carson pulling out of NH and SC was misleading and deliberate. Perhaps it was a one-time mistake. But in light of the mailer and in light of Cruz’s utter disingenuousness about what he did and didn’t support with the Gang of 8 amendments, it seems to me he’s just not a man of forthright character at times.

Which makes his preachiness all the more grating. It’s Televangelist to me. Perhaps sincere, perhaps totally corrupt. Who can know?

Because of his Clintonian prevarication and tendency to wear his Christianity on his sleeve as a political tool, I cannot support Cruz; I believe he doesn’t have the character to represent me well, and I do not think he can effectively persuade large number of people to move in the direction of liberty and limited government.

Rubio has his own baggage, but it is mostly just one area—immigration. I think that Rubio, as a young Tea Party Freshman, was pushed by party leaders into a role where he could be expended. He was told this “bipartisanship’ would earn his bona fides with the Party establishment. He wanted to get along, so he went along. And, like someone inexperienced and unprepared, he got rolled by Schumer and Reid and others. At least he had the judgment to recognize he was had, and pulled out rather than ride it all the way down like Slim Pickens in Dr., Strangelove.

Rubio learned from that experience. He has been very reliable since. I think he sees the proper picture of America’s place in the world and how best to advance our interests. I also think he’s far more electable than any other candidate in the field when pitted in a general election.

A Rubio candidacy is not only more likely to win, but likely to preserve governing majorities in the House and Senate. A Cruz candidacy? Perhaps that governing majority disappears and you end up with a self righteous President railing about a do-nothing Congress (sound familiar?).

Unless new information comes out showing Cruz to have been the victim of smear tactics about his own tactics, or new informaion comes out about Rubio (a scandal of some kind), I'm going to support Rubio.

01/18/2016

Neither is Trump a Conservative. Just as the alignment of the Allies in WW2 was built around the common enemy, so too is the relationship between Trump and 'conservative' voters. The common enemy is the Republican Establishment. Or so the voters seem to think it is. What evidence says that Trump also has them as an enemy?

When the war ended, Stalin's Russia went from ally to enemy seemingly overnight. Recall that the US airdropped food to Berlin for over a year starting in 1948. Similarly, would Republican voters, dying to be taken seriously by its party leadership, be facing a new enemy seemingly overnight in their former ally Donald Trump?

Other than brash talk about bullying the world into our will, I've heard nothing from Trump that explains the reasons he no longer holds all his previously liberal positions on socialized medicine, abortion, and such. Why is he waiting until now to make immigration an issue? Trump could have been purchasing Super Bowl commercials for the last decade to persuade people on his immigration position. Yet he didn't. Why not? Why is this issue only NOW important?

It's reasonable to conclude that immigration is merely a stepping stone for Trump to use to fool Republican voters. Angry at the establishment that continues to ignore them and undermine them, these primary voters are all too easily led off by the Pied Piper of Primaries.

01/05/2016

I had to re-read this headline a couple times. There is a whole lot of scary-stupid packed into that phrase.

First-- who among us is not vulnerable to gun violence? Is there anyone who can say they have no risk at all of being exposed to violence-- gun-related or otherwise? Of course not.

Second-- how do you give more rights to someone on the basis of their potential future victim status? This is a really awful euphemism. The President doesn't want to characterize his desires--and the desires of many other Americans-- as taking rights away from anyone. So the almost-hilariously stretched characterization is that of giving more rights to some citizens. It's just taking away rights from law-abiding people. But let's not call it that.

If perhaps we punish enough innocent people, we'll have couple guilty people get it, too. That's the rationale.

Of course, it's not actually about reducing violence in total. No, it's about whether that violence occurs in forgettable, bite-sized chunks like the every day murders in Chicago-- or whether it occurs in clusters all at once-- the kind of clusters that the media feeds and that are used by easily traumatized Left to demand that its hypersensitivity and unearned moral superiority outweigh the cute and antiquated Constitutional rights of fellow Americans.

06/23/2015

Kermet (Merl?) Key responded to my recent letter to the editor of the Republic.

He's wanting to have some discussion, and I will indulge him. He clearly doesn't understand that the letter consists firstly of a gentle rebuke to judgmental (and potentially self-righteous) Christians, but then separately of an inquiry into the source of Gay Pride, and finally an argument why special protections of LGBT people in the law is impractical as a legal matter and illogical based on current law.

He begins:

Willful ignorance is nothing of which to be proud. For example, when Justin Hohn begins his June 18th letter to the editor he attempts to address his fellow Christians regarding the source of LGBT pride and focuses primarily on his interpretation of the Bible. Perhaps the former City Council candidate merely forgot that there are more than one-hundred (100) Christian churches in Columbus (yes, that’s the city and not the county). If everyone of them reads their Bible’s the same way Justin Hohn does then perhaps he can explain to them, and us, why there seems to be a need for so many different churches?

But that alone does not prove willful ignorance, merely sinful pride and arrogance in the belief that one person’s limited understanding of the infinite is enough to determine how another person should live their lives for the infinite. No the willful ignorance comes from the complete lack of understanding the source of LGBT Pride.

Now, if you have any basic familiarity with formal rhetoric, you've already identified an impressive flourish of fallacy:

Fallacy #1: That since some Christians disagree on different parts of the Bible, none of it is knowable and there is no such thing as consensus. In reality, very much of the Bible is agreed upon by most Christian churches, which is why these churches all claim the descriptor of "Christian."

Fallacy #2: That the number of churches in Columbus has anything at all to do with the specific points I made about the Biblical view of sin in general and the sin of homosexuality in particular. In reality, I never cited the number of churches as dispositive about anything.

Fallacy #3: That it proves anything at all- willful ignorance, sinful pride, or arrogance to claim that you can understand plain Biblical language. In reality, there are things about the Bible that remain somewhat unclear, but this isn't one of them.

Fallacy #4: That I'm trying to force someone to live their life a certain way in accordance to my Biblical worldview by arguing that homosexuals should not feel proud of that identity and that extending special legal protections to them is inappropriate. In reality, I'm only saying what I'm saying—nothing more, nothing less. I’m not at all proposing any “bedroom’ police, much to chagrin of those like Mr. Key who prefer to argue against straw men of their making.

Mr. Key transitions to an attempt to legitimize the "pride" of the homosexual by sharing the history of the Stonewall Riots and the Christopher Steet Gay Liberation March. Is this really a source of gay pride? That because some other homosexuals nearly 50 years ago marched in a parade where they were unpopular, that today's homosexuals should feel proud of themselves? That seems wholly inadequate as an explanation to me. Is it courageous to march in the street for the right to sodomize when others may attack you? I think not. I wouldn't find it courageous if a KKK group brazenly marched in the street to inflame public emotions and stir up trouble. That's not courage-- it's narcissism. It's placing ones own desires above the welfare of others.

Contrast this with a soldier returning home from Viet Nam who is spat upon or attacked. Why is this actually courageous? Is it not because the soldier was serving his country instead of himself? It is the antithesis if the gay "courage" it takes to march in the street.

No, this Christopher Street march wasn't courageous, it was selfishness. There’s no courage here to claim. And even if there were courage to claim, it is specious it transfer that pride to a homosexual 50 years—a couple generations--and hundreds of miles removed from it.

Mr. Key cites Bill Nye(!) to support his claim that race is a human construct. Well, perhaps with the middle-schoolers alarmingly exposed to Mr. Key’s ways of thinking, this is sufficient. But here in the land of adults, we cite adult sources, not children’s entertainers. This is the fallacy of “appeal to authority”—only the authority here is a children’s entertainer. Hilarious. Or concerning, depending.

Mr. Key thinks that my argument that LGBT identity is solely based on an individual’s own identification as such (based their feelings), means that I missed the meeting of the HRC. We already know that logic is a major challenge for some, but I’ll helpfully point out that it means no such thing. The absence of my name on an attendance roster, or a photo of all attendees that I’m not in, or a simple affirmation from me that I didn’t attend—THOSE things would indicate that I didn’t attend the meeting. Since Mr. Key isn’t very good at making his own argument, I will help him out.

What Mr. Key is likely trying to say is that if I had attended the HRC meeting I would know that others can apparently define “LGBT” sufficiently to form a basis on which to discriminate against someone.

But this isn’t defining LGBT identity at all. An effeminate straight man could be plausibly be denied housing by a landlord based on that’s landlord’s suspicion, that the straight man was actually gay. That does not make the straight man gay. He is still straight—and WHY? Because HE SAYS HE IS. That’s the point. Only the individual is arbiter of his own LGBT “identity”—regardless of the perception of others.

Interestingly, Title VII protections only apply to those who actually belong to a protected class and can prove that the discrimination was because they are part of that class.

So our hypothetical straight man cannot being a sexual orientation claim because he’s not actually gay- regardless of whether the discriminator thought he was and even intended to discriminate against him.

While I am rather well-read, I am not a lawyer and there may very well be legal precedent that allows someone to claim protected status if they are discriminated against because the discriminator intended to discriminate against a protected group that the individual was not a part of. But from what I can tell, one must actually be a part of that protected class in order to have any legal standing at all.